More about the Participation Grade - 10%

Participation is considered to be any interaction in the public channels in Slack that will help you and your classmates learn. Here are some examples:

Replying to a discussion exercise

Asking a question about a concept that is confusing to you

Answering an administrative question that a classmate has

Posting a link to a relevant article

Having a friendly chat with your classmates about careers, Smartly, or a business topic, and more.

Aim for at least one interaction per week, but ideally try to comment on each exercise.

Your participation is measured on whether you reply to exercises and discussion questions with thoughtfulness:

This program is about learning, so it’s not expected that you already know all the material! Just come to the discussion prepared to learn and to help your classmates. We want you to build off of each other’s knowledge so you can grow and achieve more than if you were doing the MBA alone.

We're looking for you to be actively engaged in the Slack group however you can, given your busy schedules. Participation will help you learn, and you'll get from it what you put in. Participation does not include just reading through posts—it's your thoughts and ideas that will stimulate a helpful, friendly, motivating community for you and your classmates.

Even if you see other comments that are similar to yours on exercises and case studies, we think there is value in articulating your thoughts, so we encourage you to post your responses. Your responses to exercises and case studies are not graded on whether they are "right" or "wrong." Just like within Smartly lessons, you don't always need to have the right answer—this is a learning environment.

We measure both the number of comments and the quality of your responses.

Only participation in the public channels in Slack are counted.

Private conversations are certainly valuable, and we encourage you to build relationships with one another in both public and private channels. For the purposes of the Participation grade, we are only able to see conversations in public channels. Make sure to some degree that you are participating there, too.

From time to time, we will offer video discussion exercises over Google Hangouts to give you a chance to interact in a different way with your classmates. When you participate in these sessions, please send a brief update to a public channel in Slack so that we can measure your participation. That might mean saying something like: “Joining the discussion chat now!” or “Had a great chat with @john @karim @tom this evening.”

More about SMARTCASE scores - 20%

As you progress through lessons in Smartly, feel free to explore different answer options (both correct and incorrect) that trigger helpful feedback. You are not expected to get all "correct answers" while you are learning—mistakes are half of learning, after all—so, you aren't graded on regular lessons. You are graded on SMARTCASE lessons, as mentioned above. Only your top score in SMARTCASEs will count towards your final grade, so you can feel free to take SMARTCASEs as many times as you like.

More about the Concentration Exams - 60%

You will take eight Concentration Exams over the course of your program. These exams are made available after each concentration has ended, according to your schedule. The exams are all open book, and each consists of several lessons. They're similar in format to SMARTCASEs, meaning there are no open response questions. For more about the concentration exams, click here.